The Mast-Head: When Satire Backfires

In the few weeks since the terrorist shootings in Paris, a number of people have asked about my take on the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and whether The Star would have published them.

Whether to reprint these images was a serious question, one that many news organizations around the world asked themselves in the days after 11 people were killed at the office of the satirical magazine. In the United States a great number of editors decided to run them either for their news value or out of a sense of solidarity with those killed, or even for reasons of defiance. Others did not.

Notably, Dean Baquet, the relatively new executive editor of The New York Times, chose not to print them. His reasoning, which The Times made available on its website and which we endorse, included, “We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.”

Running these cartoons was never a real consideration at The Star, since the news did not directly involve our coverage area. However, the general question about when and how to handle certain kinds of material is worth talking about. The Star has no hard-and-fast rule, but the yardstick we use to measure such things is that if we are going to run something that will deeply offend some readers, there had better be an overwhelmingly good reason to do so.

An example that I give the staff is that the uncalled-for use of profanity, an F-bomb perhaps, in most cases is not necessary. But, if a hypothetical town official dropped one during a public meeting, it then would be newsworthy and fit to print.

One cannot always catch everything that is going to offend. Things slip through, such as the description of a Bridgehampton neighborhood as “crack alley” in our pages not that long ago. That does not excuse it, however, and I regret that it happened. But something as obviously insulting as stereotype-heavy drawings of the Prophet Mohammed or a caricature of a black French high official as a monkey did not need to be redistributed as widely as they were in the aftermath of the shootings.

French intellectuals have all sorts of explanations for why the context of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons justifies their publication. But to the people who saw and see their religion maligned or race depicted as something less than human, those subtleties may be less than convincing, especially here in the United States, where equal rights and respect for all is something we strive for.